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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000000638. When citing the article, please cite: A. Tansu Barker, Erdener Kaynak, (1992), “An Empirical Investigation of the Differences between Initiating and Continuing Exporters”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 26 Iss 3 pp. 27 - 36.

Examines the characteristics of small and medium‐sized initiating and continuing exporting firms from Saskatchewan, Canada. As the US is the major trading partner of Canada and most of the initial export activities of Canadian firms are destined for the US markets, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Canada and the US has far‐reaching implications on the behaviour and performance of small and medium‐sized exporters from both sides of the border. Offers policy guidelines to those small and medium‐sized Asia‐Pacific firms which are considering establishing trading links with North American firms.

Summarizes the basic structure of a general multi‐stage salesforce model, and presents experiences in implementing that framework. Discusses the benefits of the use of such a model, and concludes that the key to success for a small company to be based on using subjective estimates of the needs of a firm in the absence of hard data and on operational involvement of decision makers.

The trend towards “supermarket” financial services will lead to a greater degree of specialisation on the part of the different financial institutions in terms of function or client base, resulting in the consumer being offered a greater variety of choice, from no frills, low‐cost core products to full service augmented products. Ability to survive within the trend will rest on adapting creatively to the environment; sectors made up of smaller organisations have greater flexibility but this can only be used to advantage if sensitive to the market's changing nature. Financial institutions will become more marketing oriented in seeking to attract customers and differentiate services.

The attitudes and perceptions of New Zealanders toward current consumerism issues are outlined and compared with four other countries. Many of the opinions expressed are critical of the existing practices of business and appear to be common in the other four countries. The theory of consumer product life cycle suggesting the development of national consumer movements was not supported by the data obtained in New Zealand.

The impact of characteristics of salespeople, activities of sales managers and territory design are investigated as antecedents of sales organization performance among Canadian salesforces. Based on MANOVA analysis of responses from 102 field sales managers, more effective sales organizations have salespeople who are more motivated, employ managers who direct more and are more satisfied with the design of their territories. Sales managers must adopt better people and communication skills to train and direct their salespeople who are expected to provide better service and establish long‐term relations with their customers.

A mail survey administered to sales managers investigates the factors that influence the effectiveness of their sales organizations. The most important factors found are building long‐term relations, inter‐departmental co‐ordination, training for both salespeople and field managers and information capabilities. Differences among the respondents are based on seniority as well as firm‐level performance. High performance firms and field managers consider team selling to be the most important determinant of salesforce effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of salespeople’s customer orientation on the relationship between sales manager personal characteristics, fellow salespeople’s characteristics, job satisfaction and adaptive selling and salespeople’s performance in the insurance industry in Jordan.

A structured and self-administered survey was employed targeting 500 insurance salespeople working at insurance companies operating in Jordan. The final sample size was 320 salespeople representing a response rate of 64 percent. A Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the research constructs dimensions, unidimensionality, validity and composite reliability. Structural path analysis was also used to test the hypothesized relationships of the research model.

The empirical findings indicate that salespeople’s customer orientation fully mediates the effect of fellow salespeople’s characteristics and adaptive selling on salespeople’s performance. Sales managers’ personal characteristics have a direct effect on salespeople’s performance, contrary to job satisfaction that had no effect on salespeople’s performance.

This paper has examined only five factors that affected directly and indirectly salespeople’s performance; meanwhile other factors may affect their performance, such as salespeople experience, internal marketing and corporate image. Additionally, the fact that paper’s sample consisted only of insurance salespeople working at insurance companies limits its generalization potential to other industries.

The findings emphasize the importance of fostering good relationships among fellow salespeople’s characteristics and adaptive selling strategies. Further, sales managers’ personal characteristics directly affecting salespeople’s performance signifies the importance to hire managers with the right personal approach.

This paper represents one of the early attempts that investigate factors affecting salespeople’s performance through the mediating role of customer orientation. Accordingly, the findings shed more light into the strategic role of this construct in enhancing salespeople’s performance. Also, the paper is the first of its kind to build and examine an integrated model of salespeople’s performance in the insurance market of Jordan, which provides valuable empirical evidence concerning the drivers of salespeople’s performance in the insurance industry in Jordan.

This paper aims to explore the increasing importance of the intraorganizational dimension of the sales role (IDSR) based on service-ecosystem theory. Specifically, it examines how firms can improve interactions both internally and with external actors and stakeholders to both create and sustain advantageous “thin crossing points” (Hartmann et al. 2018). Academic research on sales ecosystems has yet to fully harness the rich insights and potential afforded by the crossing-point perspective.

After developing and unpacking the paper’s guiding conceptual framework (Figure 1), the authors focus on crossing points and the diversity of interactions between the contemporary sales force and its many stakeholders. They examine the sales literature, identify opportunities for thinning sales crossing points and propose dozens of research questions and needs.

The paper examines the importance of improving interactions both within and outside the vendor firm to thin crossing points, further develops the concept of the “sales ecosystem” and contributes a series of important research questions for future examination.

The paper focuses on applying “thick” and “thin” crossing points, a key element of Hartman et al. (2018). The primary limitation of the paper is that it focuses solely on the crossing-points perspective and does not consider other applications of Hartman et al. (2018).

This work informs managers of the need to improve interactions both within and outside the firm by thinning crossing points. Improving relationships with stakeholders will improve many vendor firm and customer outcomes, including performance.

Integrating findings from the literature, the authors propose a conceptual framework to encompass the entire diversity of idiosyncratic interactions as well as long-term relationships the sales force experiences. They discuss the strategic importance of thinning crossing points as well as the competitive disadvantages, even peril, “thick” crossing points create. They propose an ambitious research agenda based on dozens of questions to drive further examination of the IDSR from a sales-ecosystem perspective.

Strategy is examined, using newness of products, markets and technology as the variables. An understanding of newness with reference to the concept of continuous vs. discontinuous innovation along these three dimensions could facilitate evaluation of market and profit potential and the risk factor. Furthermore, this classification system may suggest new business opportunities by indicating gaps in the market and pointing out the critical factor(s) associated with those gaps.